Monday, February 4, 2013

If you want to know what the future of America is going to be like, just look at the city of Detroit. Once upon a time it was a symbol of everything that America was doing right, but today it has been transformed into a rotting, decaying, post-apocalyptic hellhole. Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation. It was the greatest manufacturing city the world had ever seen, and the rest of the globe looked at Detroit with a sense of awe and wonder. But now the city of Detroit has become a bad joke to the rest of the world. Unemployment is rampant, 60 percent of the children are living in poverty and the city government is on the verge of bankruptcy. They say that Detroit is just a matter of "weeks or months" away from running out of cash, and when Detroit does declare bankruptcy it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States. But don't look down on Detroit, because the truth is that Detroit is really a metaphor for what is happening to America as a whole. In the United States today, our manufacturing infrastructure has been gutted, poverty is absolutely exploding and we are rapidly approaching national bankruptcy. Detroit may have gotten there first, but the rest of the country will follow soon enough.

Back during the boom years, Detroit was known for making great cars. Today, it is known for scenes of desolation and decay. It is full of vandalized homes, abandoned schools and empty factories. The following description of what Detroit looks like at this point is from an article by Barry Yeoman...

It’s hard to describe the city’s physical landscape without producing what Detroiters call “ruin porn.” Brick houses with bays and turrets sit windowless or boarded up. Whole blocks, even clusters of blocks, have been bulldozed. Retail strips have been reduced to a dollar store here, a storefront church there, and a whole lot of plywood in between. Not a single chain supermarket remains.

When you are a manufacturing area, and you lose half of your manufacturing jobs over the course of a single decade, of course things are going to get really, really bad.

So just how bad have things gotten in Detroit?

The following are 24 facts about the city of Detroit that will shock you...

#1 Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and it was once home to close to 2 million people. But over the last several decades people have been fleeing in droves. According to the 2010 census, only 713,000 people now live in Detroit, and city officials admit that the population has probably slipped under 700,000 at this point.

#2 The population of Detroit has declined by about 25 percent over the past decade. The last time the population of Detroit was this low was all the way back in 1910.

#3 Today, Detroit is only the 18th-largest city in America. It is now smaller than Austin, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina.

#21 At one point, 100 bus drivers in Detroit refused to drive their routes because they were afraid of being attacked out on the streets in broad daylight. The head of the bus drivers union, Henry Gaffney, said that the drivers were literally "scared for their lives"....

“Our drivers are scared, they’re scared for their lives. This has been an ongoing situation about security. I think yesterday kind of just topped it off, when one of my drivers was beat up by some teenagers down in the middle of Rosa Parks and it took the police almost 30 minutes to get there, in downtown Detroit,” said Gaffney.

#22 There have been reports that gangs of young men with AK-47s have been terrorizing gas stations all over Detroit.

#23 Detroit was once known for making some of the greatest cars in the world. Now, it is known around the world as a dumping ground for the dead...

From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block.

They were just the latest victims of foul play whose remains went undiscovered for days after being hidden deep inside Detroit's vast urban wilderness -- a crumbling wasteland rarely visited by outsiders and infrequently patrolled by police.

#24 Detroit's public schools are an absolute nightmare. The following is from one of my readers that actually attended one of the "best" public schools in Detroit...

The school was a new seven story building just a couple of years old. The bathrooms would often lack toilet paper & soap beyond the second floor (the main floor), the bathroom sinks would often not work. The water fountains on north side of the building on from the third floor & up did not work. The elevators would constantly break down. I even got stuck on the elevator before. I almost tripped down a half a flight of stairs because the elastic seal (it was the metal bar at the front of a treader of I don't know the name of it.) the stairs was not properly installed.

Students would often have sex on the stairs & throughout the school. Parents actually called the school many times & reported kids having sex on the stairs because all of them had glass windows 270 degrees.

Even over in Europe they write stories about the dramatic decline of Detroit. For example, the following is how one British reporter described his visit to Detroit...

Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.

For those that want to read even more about the horrifying downfall of Detroit, there are some amazing charts that graphically show the decline of Detroit right here.

So what is the solution?

How can we fix Detroit?

Well, why don't we just build a monorail! Of course that sounds ridiculous, but the federal government has actually committed $25 million to construct "a streetcar line" that nobody really wants and that very few people would probably actually use. Perhaps they could be excused for wasting so much money on a bad idea if there had not already been 24 failed attempts to develop a successful public transit system in Detroit over the past four decades.

Well, why don't we just build a bunch of theme parks instead? After all, tourists would just flock to Detroit, right?

Actually, a much better idea would have been to not allow millions of our good paying manufacturing jobs to be shipped to the other side of the world, but it is too late for that at this point.

But once again, please do not look down on the city of Detroit. Instead, let the city of Detroit serve as a warning for the rest of us.

The truth is that the entire U.S. economy is in an advanced state of decline...

-The percentage of the civilian labor force in the United States that is employed has been steadily declining every single year since 2006.

-An astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

-Amazingly, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans with either Master's degrees or Ph.D.s that are enrolled in the food stamp program at this point.

We are a nation that consumes far more wealth than we produce, we are a nation that is constantly bleeding jobs, businesses and wealth, and we are a nation that is going deeper into debt with each passing day.

Yes, Detroit may have gone over the edge into economic oblivion first, but the rest of the nation is steamrolling down the exact same path that Detroit has gone.

“Those who have been treating Israel like a spoilt child should expect anything from them, at any time,” Erdogan said at a press conference in Istanbul on Sunday.

“As I say time and again, Israel has a mentality of waging terrorism. Right now, there is no telling what it might do and where it might do it.”

“We cannot regard a violation of air space as acceptable. What Israel does is completely against international law… it is beyond condemnation,” Erdogan said. “I am worried that in a situation like this, any scenario can play out in the future.”

The Syrian army said in a statement on January 30 that two people were killed and five others injured in an Israeli airstrike on a research center in Jamraya, located 25 kilometers (15 miles) northwest of Damascus.

On January 31, Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah also condemned the Israeli attack and said it was “barbaric aggression.”

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of security forces, have been killed in the turmoil. The Syrian government says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside.

Syrian ruler Bashar Assad has ordered the resumption of weapons transfers to the Lebanese Hizballah, DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources report. This was agreed with Iran’s National Security Director Saeed Jalilee, who arrived in Damascus after Israel’s reported air strike last Wednesday, Jan. 30, inter alia, on Syrian trucks preparing to ferry to Lebanon for Hizballah the sophisticated Iran-supplied arms stored at the Jamraya military complex north of Damascus.

The Syrian ruler assured the Iranian official that he would not be deterred by what he called acts of “aggression.” It was up to Syria and Iran to put their heads together to find a safe method of getting the hardware across to Hizballah without exposing it to Israeli attack in truck convoys on the open road. Jalilee is still in Damascus. He arrived Saturday to discuss with Syrian and Hizballah how to activate against Israel the secret mutual defense pact binding Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas.

According to our sources, Israeli military tacticians believe that as winter weather starts clearing up, Syria and Iran will devise crafty methods for outwitting Israel and getting the weapons to Lebanon – for example, disassembling the missiles and launchers and disguising them as non-lethal merchandize. They could then be spirited across from Syria to Lebanon in small packages by the smuggling rings regularly operating on their common border.

In anticipation of such tricks, the Israeli Air Force has in recent days thrown a round-the-clock blanket over the border area. It is constantly monitoring the traffic moving across and is ready to prevent any arms traffic. Without going through any formalities, Israel has thus effectively imposed a no-fly regime over a buffer zone straddling the Syrian-Lebanese border and placed it under the control of its air force.

Israeli officials have been warning for months that the IDF will not allow the transfer of advanced Syrian weapons – including chemical and biological weapons – to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front and Hezbollah.

Without directly confirming the Israel attack on the Jamraya military compound, defense minister Ehud Barak told the Munich security conference Sunday “…what happened in Syria several days ago… that’s proof that when we said something we mean it… and we say that we don’t think it should be allowed to bring advanced weapons systems into Lebanon.”

Israel’s actions to this end, including over flights by its air force which are widely reported by the Lebanese media, were undertaken after Assad was seen to be bent on testing Israel’s resolve to prevent arms transfers to Hizballah. These transfers were expressly prohibited under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which ended the Israeli-Hizballah war in 2006.

An Iranian nuclear bomb is more dangerous than the consequences of attacking the Iranian nuclear reactors, Channel 10 quoted former head of IDF Intelligence Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin as saying on Monday at a conference to present the Institute for National Security Studies' (INSS) strategic assessment for 2013.

"Iran completed all of the steps that would allow it to make a nuclear bomb when it decides to, and when it does, Israel will have to act," Channel 10 quoted him as saying.

"They don't have enough centrifuges. When they have over 10,000 centrifuges, it will justify an Israeli and American action," he said.However, Yadlin stressed that Iran's nuclear program has yet to reach the point of no return and that Israel must give diplomacy a chance first.

He also emphasized the important of "deepening the strategic dialogue with the United States."

On Sunday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the new government's main objective would be to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

"This is a task [that is] becoming more difficult because Iran is acquiring new centrifuges that reduce the enrichment time. We cannot accept this," Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting.

Tehran announced last week that it was upgrading its nuclear enrichment equipment at the Natanz nuclear plant, something that will speed up the uranium enrichment process.

The death of the man dubbed “America’s deadliest sniper,” an ex-member of SEAL Team 3 with more than 150 confirmed kills, killed Saturday in Texas, allegedly by a war vet he was trying to help, is reinvigorating the national conversation on gun control.

President Obama is scheduled to step off his plane in Minneapolis Monday to continue a Democratic-backed push for stronger gun control. But as he enters the City of Lakes to meet with local law enforcement, he will be coming off less than 48 hours since the latest in a string of high-profile violent crimes that have plagued the last week.

Audiences knew decorated veteran Chris Kyle from the NBC reality show “Stars and Stripes,” and his New York Times bestselling autobiography “American Sniper,” but his service didn’t stop with retirement: Kyle volunteered his time helping veterans cope with post traumatic stress disorder, reintroducing them to firearms.

Now he may have been killed by one of those troubled vets he was trying to help. Authorities have arrested 25-year-old Eddie Ray Routh, a former Marine who police say may have been suffering from “some type of mental illness” when he allegedly killed Kyle and the SEAL’s neighbor at gun range in Texas. The motive today was still unclear.

The incident speaks to a larger issue of mental health in America as the national gun debate continues. As President Obama and gun-control advocates continue to spar with opponents who say any further restrictions on the weapons would be an infringement of their Second Amendment rights, strengthening mental health care seems to be one aspect of the debate that both sides agree on.

For veterans coming back from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, care can be a slow process. The Department of Veterans Affairs has increased its staff to attempt to stay ahead of the influx, but according to an inspector general report released last year, roughly half of new mental health patients had to wait for about 50 days before their first evaluation. A separate VA study released Friday found an average 22 former service members commit suicide each day.

And the number of veterans receiving mental health treatment from the VA is steadily rising. The last year saw more than 1.3 million soldiers enter the system, up from 927,000 in 2006.

Mental health screens in gun sales have also been driven into the debate. While lawmakers bring forward national proposals to make more robust data systems for law enforcement to use in background checks, individual states including Maryland and New York have introduced legislation — expected to pass — that would do the same at the local level. The bills in the two states, both of which are led by Democratic governors, may offer a window into proposals to come at the federal level.

New York’s proposed legislation, spearheaded by White House ally Gov. Andrew Cuomo, would empower judges to require that people who are determined to be a threat to others must get outpatient care. The plan also requires that when a mental health professional determines a gun owner is likely to hurt himself or others, the risk must be reported and the gun removed by law enforcement.ABC

This chemical attack if it's to Israel could lead to the retaliation to Damascus and then we will see the Isaiah 17:1 accomplished in front of our very eyes...The burden of Damascus Behold, Damascus is taken away from [being] a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

As a consequence would come an international coalition attack from the arab countries and Russia leading to Ezekiel 38 and 39.....

Analysis of recent satellite images has shown new activity on the southern edge of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, while preparations at a second tunnel to the west were apparently completed earlier, a South Korean government source told the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.

The paper quoted a military official as saying, "There is a chance that the southern tunnel is a decoy, but we are not ruling out that the regime will conduct nuclear tests simultaneously at both tunnels."

There is a widespread belief that North Korea will go ahead with what would be its third nuclear test in the near future, with the regime still angrily denouncing criticism by the United Nations Security Council for the launch in December of what Pyongyang claims was a rocket to put a satellite into orbit.

That protestation has been undermined by North Korea putting on display in Pyongyang a section of fuselage from an identical vehicle and labelling it as a ballistic missile.

The South Korean military and international intelligence agencies have prepared for the North's anticipated nuclear test and hope that data they can retrieve will provide new pointers on just how far Pyongyang has advanced in its efforts to develop a nuclear warhead that is small enough to be attached to a ballistic missile.

Speaking during a visit to Damascus, the Syrian capital, Mr Jalili, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said: "Just like it regretted all its wars ... the Zionist entity will regret its aggression against Syria.

"The Syrian people and government are serious about this, and the Muslim world supports Syria.

"Syria is at the forefront of the Muslim world's confrontation with the Zionist entity," he added, in reference to Israel.

In Munich on Sunday, Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, implicitly confirmed that the Jewish state had staged an air strike on Syria, following reports of an air raid which Damascus said targeted a military complex near the capital.

Mr Barak told the Munich Security Conference that the strike was "another proof that when we say something we mean it."

Wednesday's air strike targeted surface-to-air missiles and an adjacent military complex believed to house chemical agents, according to a US official.

Tehran has provided Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime with unequivocal support throughout the country's 22-month conflict, which the UN says has left more than 60,000 people dead.

Analysts have warned of the potential regional spillover of the conflict, which has divided the international community into two camps.

One Russia-led camp has backed Mr Assad, the other, led by the United States, has supported the revolt.